We are down to our last two events before the FedExCup playoffs!
Players will be making their final push to try and advance as far as they can over the next few weeks. I thought the Rocket Classic delivered an unusually stout list of options teeing it up, with Cameron Young, Wyndham Clark, Xander Schauffele, Chris Gotterup and a handful of others making the start this weekend in Detroit.
Let's dive into my Rocket Classic picks and PGA Tour best bets for this week's event.
Rocket Classic Outright Picks
Jackson Suber 96/1
Six players cracked the top 40 across all seven categories I weighed this week. The top featured your typical suspects: Cameron Young, Chris Gotterup, Jackson Koivun, and Patrick Cantlay. The other two were options who found themselves down the slate and in what I deemed a value range through different iterations of the market.
For the sake of reference, Doug Ghim would be the one not mentioned here. I decided to take him as a top 20 at (+300, ties paid in full). That is a wager you will only see me talk about inside this article or over on my website. Ghim is someone that has notoriously burned me as I have chased him inside the outright market. I haven't decided if he will be added before the week ends for that sector, but I didn't have a golfer with more statistical upside for the price.
The one we will include for this outright section is Jackson Suber. We saw Suber miss the cut at the 3M after a terrible start on Friday, which placed him in the water early in his round. That is always going to be the problem with water-laced courses: one or two bad shots disproportionately will affect someone's output.
Suber's stats landed as a top 12 player in this field for upside. The overall production was even better than that return. And the statistics were respectable across the board. That is typically a recipe that creates someone I want to back for the week. It will be no different here for Suber, who I thought was overly boosted in the outright market after one poor showing.
Nicolai Hojgaard 50/1
I will talk a little more about Nicolai Hojgaard in the section below, but I thought the boom-or-bust nature of his data played better for an upside market than it would for safety.
Hojgaard delivered four top-five grades within my model, including a first-place mark for Expected Driving + Long/Short Iron Proximity. Detroit Golf Club rewards off-the-tee acumen and specific ranges of approach shots, and Hojgaard delivers at the highest level for all three answers presented above.
The floor is another missed-cut showing. The ceiling is him capturing his first title on the PGA Tour.
Rocket Classic Matchup Pick
Nicolai Hojgaard -110 over Harris English
On a board with unknown elements due to course changes, I found the overall matchup slate left a ton to be desired when trying to handicap head-to-head pairings for the week.
Very little value presented itself when I ran proper pricing. Any outlier totals were typically accompanied by questions on the opposite end that left me uncomfortable about who I was backing (and perhaps even who I was fading). Anyone who follows this article weekly will know that a lot of my pre-event process stems from finding a player pool to fade in matchups and attempting to pinpoint the best values matched against them.
Harris English is not a standard fade candidate. I've talked all season about his increase in off-the-tee acumen. That metric began this year with an onslaught of top 30 finishes, before a recent wall was struck by him that generated three missed-cut showings over his last four starts since the U.S. Open. I don't want that narrative to suggest that English can't regain his early form of 2026. In fact, there is a lot to like about him when diving deeper into the numbers (outside of iron play). However, what made me land on this wager was the immense upside my model seems to be projecting for Nicolai Hojgaard.
The floor is much lower than I would care to see for a matchup bet. A negative safety trajectory is not something you want to find yourself consistently chasing, but the long-term metrics tell a completely different story than what we have received over the last 24 rounds when gearing the stats for Detroit Golf Club.
I wouldn't be shocked if this bet needs to be decided late on Sunday. I just think the recent form of both caused books to place them into the same pairing, which, according to my numbers, presented Hojgaard in a range that was too low for the upside he possessed this week. My math suggests he is more of a 35/1 sort of golfer than one landing closer to the 70/1 mark.
